Latest available usage statistics for Facebook Messenger alone report 1.2 billion monthly users.

There's certainly a privacy conversation being had, but to suggest that Messenger doesn't matter because your circle doesn't use it is absurd.

As of the second quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly active users. That's a third of the total population of Earth and nearly 3 times the population of the Southern Hemisphere. So my comparison was actually overly generous.

I correctly identified Uber Move, Airbnb Cereal, and Google Sans on the first try. What do I win?

Considering nobody I know lives in the Southern Hemisphere, does that half of the globe really matter?

(Hint: Yes.)

IBM made an error similar to Uber's attempt to "celebrate cities" prior to their Carbon design system. IBM's palette was almost comically broad, so that every conceivable color could be IBM. Which of course meant that they had no colors; if every color is IBM, none is.

I hope to see this simple concept beaten into the popular design consciousness so that we can avoid repeating the same mistake.

This is great. There's a third component in my system, equally as important as the first two: pressure testing. Across any discipline from paintball to design to JavaScript, it's easy to talk yourself into believing you're good at something. Put your skills up against a master and find out.

ZZT, the 1991 adventure game for MS-DOS. I used it to make my first interactive virtual world when I was 5 or 6 years old. The graphics were entirely ASCII art, and ZZT-OOP was an ingeniously simple scripting language for basic video game mechanics that helped unlock a ton of creativity. Thanks, Tim Sweeney.